From: Fredy A. Hernández (fredyh@netgate.com.uy)
Date: Fri Mar 30 2001 - 06:13:02 MST
> > Gender-neutral writing need not be tortured. And gender neutral
> > writing about AIs is particularly easy, as compared to gender neutral
> > writing about humans. The difficulty with humans is that they *do*
> > have a gender, but we may not wish to specify which gender. That
> > makes for a _slightly_ difficult situation, particularly for
> > inexperienced or clumsy writers.
>
> Human gender is a multidimensional spectrum of reality that fits only
> clumsily into the dyadic Male/Female categories, and people have been
> surgically mutilated at birth in attempts to deny this. Even with humans,
> there is a need for a gender neutral pronoun, and it will only become
> stronger as our options increase. 'Ve' works. Read a few Egan short
story
> collections, you soon get used to it.
>
> > There is no such difficulty when writing about AIs. Because they are
not
> > biological humans, they _do not have a gender_. Therefore, we can use
> 'it'.
> > Eliezer claims that using "it" gets to be too difficult and confusing,
> > but I strongly disagree.
>
> 'It' isn't just grammatically restrictive, it's the wrong word. 'It'
means
> something non-mind. A brick. A photon. A tree. Anything far enough
down
> the complexity scale that the idea of 'murder' does not apply. I would be
> uncomfortable applying this word to any possibly conscious AI.
>
> > If anyone can come up with an example of a thought that can't clearly be
> > expressed using normal English words, but for which 've/ver' helps...
> please do so.
>
> Anything -can- be expressed using he, she, it and they, but it's an ugly
> hack if you don't -mean- he, she, it or they. Any suggestion that people
> use language more comfortable to them if and only if it is an absolute
> gramattical necessity has the tone of special pleading.
>
if this help, in spanish we use articles to refer such things. For this
case, it will be "the" FAI
regards.
Fredy a. Hernández
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